It is known practice for sellers of beverage products to provide beverage equipment to offices and the like for making beverage product. The buyer does not purchase the equipment, but rather receives the equipment at no charge or a relatively small charge. The seller recovers the cost of providing the equipment, and in many situations maintenance of the equipment, through the sale of product in an office coffee service program (“OCS program”. The seller loses profit if the customer uses the equipment to make beverages with product outside of the OCS program, i.e. not purchased from the seller, (“unauthorized product”. This is known in the industry as “customer cheating” or unauthorized equipment usage.
Usually the equipment manufacturer's name and in some situations an OCS providers name is displayed on the equipment. As a result, if the customer uses product from outside of the OCS program and the product is lower quality, these names can be tarnished in the mind of the consumer because it is now being associated with a lower quality product. It is desirable to have a method of monitoring an OCS program and the equipment to verify that only the intended OCS program product provided by the equipment provider (the “authorized product”) is used. With such a method, customer cheating can be reduced or prevented.
The issues described above with regard to providing beverages, such as in an OCS program, occur in other product providing businesses. With the foregoing in mind, this issue should not be limited to discussion of OCS programs but should be considered expansively with regard to the provision of other food products and other products generally. It is envisioned that this situation may occur in other food product businesses such as vending whereby inexpensive, off-brand or inferior products might be offered or substituted.
In addition to possibly negatively impacting the name of the equipment manufacturer, it might also negatively impact the customer of the service, for example the party who engages the service to provide equipment at its facility. For example, many employers contract for these services and products, and the switching of products could tarnish the employers name in the eyes of its employees, (i.e. the employer is providing substandard products to its employees). In this regard, it is envisioned that the these problems occur in any situation in which product is provided and there is an opportunity to substitute another product.
The present disclosure relates to a method, apparatus, and system for preventing customer cheating in the office coffee services context. The term “office coffee services” is used for illustrative purposes only. The disclosed method, apparatus, and system is useful in any context where it is desirable for a product and services provider to monitor their customers to prevent customer cheating or unauthorized equipment usage. “Customer cheating” or “unauthorized equipment usage” includes any situation for example, in which a customer exceeds the number of authorized brews or uses an unauthorized product with the beverage equipment. Although this disclosure refers to brewing equipment and beverages, the present method, apparatus, and system is also applicable to equipment used to dispense other beverages, foods and products. For convenience, the terms “brewing equipment” and “brews” are used throughout this disclosure, although “dispensing equipment” and “dispensations” may be used in place of these terms and still be within the scope of this disclosure. Also disclosed is a kit for association with existing brewing equipment to provide such equipment with the functionality of the disclosed method, apparatus, and system.
The method may include a first step of providing equipment to a customer at a reduced cost or without direct charge. The equipment is designed or retrofitted to allow monitoring of the number of brewing cycles or some other measurable characteristic of the equipment related to use. Second, authorized product is provided to the customer. Authorized product is product which is authorized for the program and is associated with the system and equipment described below. The packaging or labeling of the authorized product contains at least one technological measure to identify the product as authorized product. The technological measures can also be read by or otherwise communicate with or provide information to the beverage equipment either directly or indirectly to authorize or activate a predetermined number of brewing cycles or other measurable characteristic. In a third step, the customer is only permitted to use the equipment to produce beverage when the predetermined number of authorized brewing cycles has not been exceeded or other measure has not occurred. The customer can reset or increase the number of authorized brewing cycles using new product packaging or other authorization mechanism.
The technological measures disclosed include but are not limited to the following: barcodes, radio frequency identification (RFID), carrier cards, magnetic stripes, magnetic cards, or other type of machine readable codes, indicia, numbers, characters, symbols, pictures or images, mechanisms, signals, structures, sounds, impulses, transmissions, devices or chips. The equipment may be designed to interfere, block, remove, erase, destroy, capture, catalogue, exhaust or otherwise cancel or prevent further use of the technological measure to prevent the customer from intentionally circumventing, copying or reusing the technological measure.
Additional features will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon consideration of the following detailed description of drawings.